Second was awk, SNOBOL then Icon. Powerful and easy to code file conversions and string ops make me happy. So this entry also includes a plethora of shells; DCL, sh, JCL...

Third was COBOL; Got the book, had to; code is easy to explain to pointy haired boss. Happy phboss, happy cubicleBert.

Fourth; Forth. Curiosity led to a 20 year gig. First, last and only totally immersive software development environment.

Fifth was C; Wanted to compile free stuff for the Vax, needed C; compiled a free C compiler, amazed the boss, and C amazed me in the breadth and depth of support and sheer volume of development applications.

Sixth; REBOL. Come ON! You gotta. Really.

Seveth; All the others; Worth exploring, each and every one.

Given that; I'll probably hit the grave off by one and with expertise (the 10,000 hours kind, not particularly the "oh what a knowledgeable wise person" kind) in Forth, C, Programming Languages and hopefully REBOL and maybe COBOL. And, so you know, by expertise, I mean the "gee, I don't know squat" kind of wisdom.

If I were actually eligible to participate, I would be using Ruby... I find it's just very natural to write code, and makes debugging a bit easier for me because I can read exactly what's going on as though it were plain English.

I like Java because of it's vast library. It's the only language that I've really focused on, but it is really great! Fairly simple for me to learn new concepts, and it works well for me in the contests.

this is borderline necroing, but I definitely like using Turing JUST FOR DWITE, the CCC is written in C++ for me, I'm only in gr10 so I know next to no Java, perhaps next year I will use it, its an OOP language correct?

http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=features&d2=020807
Roughly three quarters of TopCoder competitors use C++ in the arena.

Keep in mind that TopCoder does not provide a great deal of choice. C++ may win the popularity contest there, but it only had to compete against three other languages that are all fundamentally (almost) the same conceptually, and even syntactically very similar (with the exception of VB).